Re: [gentoo-amd64] Hard drive (installation)

[Mark Knecht]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 1:39 PM, Henry W. Peters <hwpeters@××××××××.com> wrote:
> On 8/28/2013 3:46 PM, czernitko wrote:
>>
>> Hi, it seems improbable that your desktop PC would have only one HDD slot.
>> Could you post your exact model number please? :)
>> To give you some hope, I have had Linux installed on external hdd for
>> daily use for about two years. It is at least five years back, it was over
>> USB 2.0 and worked quite well. I did some photo editing and retouching and
>> it was ok.
>> How big is your internal drive anyway? Isn't it possible to use around
>> 30GB for Gentoo system partition? Or do you just want to keep original hdd
>> intact?
>> Regards,
>> Peter
>>
>> Hi,
>>     If you really need a new drive (i.e. - the one that came with your
>> machine is just too small, etc.) then I'd look at imaging the drive
>> that's currently installed, putting in a larger drive, partitioning
>> this larger drive to hold both Gentoo and what ever M$ OS you might be
>> using, and then just work to get both OS's working but keep the
>> current drive on the shelf as a backup. This way you could always go
>> back to what you have.
>>
>>     Just an idea.
>>
>> Good luck,
>> Mark
>> To the point of the original poster: I currently use a Lenovo W520 laptop.
>> I have a USB3 external hard drive that I mostly use for backup, but I have
>> occasionally edited some audio (small audio files using Audacity) directly
>> on the external drive. Again, it's not the OS drive, so temp files and
>> such
>> are most likely stored on the internal drive, but I know that Audacity
>> operates in the directory in which the project is located, so it's still
>> doing a fair bit of I/O to that external drive.
>>
>> Hope this helps!
>>
>>    ~David
>
>
> Thanks all for helpful suggestions!
>
> First off, capacity of current internal drive is not really an issue with
> me... it is 2 TB... I tried installing Gentoo on another (very much older
> computer) a while ago & had problems installing Grub, with Gentoo, as I was
> dual booting with windows (not to mention conflicts with xstart & my old
> integrated SIS graphics card)... so my thinking is to install Gentoo on a
> whole other HD... which seemed to work out on my old computer (or perhaps it
> was simpler to do for a Gentoo novice, like myself).
>
> & Peter, I'm with you... I have not seen a desktop computer that didn't have
> at least one expansion bay (not that I've seen that many)... but apparently
> this HP Pavillion 500-046 does not. & I really had to dig to find out (the
> hard way).
>
> Good to hear that some have had some measure of success with external drives
> & Gentoo, rather sounds like I'll just have to try it...
>
> I have done a little more research since my earlier post, & I see that LaCie
> (& possibly others) make/sell an external drive that has usb 2 & 3/firewire
> 400 & 800/eSata (& there are, it seems, some extra Sata slots on the mother
> board of this HP computer).
>
> My plan, in fact, after a installation of Gentoo... would be to shrink the 2
> TB partition that is currently formatted in NTS... (Windows 8), use the
> other partition formatted in ext 4 (i.e., Linux) data storage.
>
> Henry
> (who's trying hard to get away from windows, again (been using various
> flavors of Linux for about five years)
>
>

Henry,
   A couple of points:

1) Not all computers will boot from an external USB drive. If you have
one around you can maybe do some experiments before you invest a lot
of time and find yourself stymied.

2) grub is not a requirement to boot Gentoo. There are links out there
demonstrating how to modify the Windows boot config files to allow you
to boot other OS's. I don't do it myself so I don't know what the
state of the Win 8 boot loader is in that respect, but there were ways
to do this with Win NT. If it's of interest then check it out.

Good luck,
Mark